More Religious, Less Intelligent—and Vice Versa

I participate in a Unitarian Universalistspiritual community. The UU faith has some basic beliefs, largely universal truths about how to be a good person, but when it comes to answering the big religious questions—is there a God, what happens when you die—UU-ism leaves that up to the individual. It’s a religion for independent thinkers. Which makes a new study on the relationship between intelligence and religiousness particularly intriguing, because it suggests that independent thinking and religion don’t go together very well.

How religious are you? How intelligent are you? The study finds that the more you are one, the less likely you are the other. That’s right. The more religious you are (defined as “the degree of involvement in facets of religion…such as beliefs in supernatural agents, costly commitment to these agents like offering of property, using beliefs in those agents to lower existential anxieties such as anxiety over death, and communal rituals that validate and affirm religious beliefs”), the less intelligent you are likely to be. The more intelligent you are (defined as “the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience”) the less religious you are likely to be.

That may sound simplistic (it is) and judgmental (it is), but it may not sound all that surprising. This study was actually a meta-analysis of 63 other studies over the past several decades, most of which found the same thing; as intelligence increases, the role of religious beliefs in your life tends to decrease, and vice versa. But this study offers something new, a fresh explanation for this inverse relationship.

The standard explanations have always been something like; religious beliefs are irrational, not anchored in science, not testable and, therefore, rejected by intelligent people who are just too smart to be taken in by all that superstitious mumbo jumbo. Let’s call that the Richard Dawkins explanation. Another standard explanation has been; intelligent people are more independent thinkers, more likely to challenge the tribal creed of beliefs proscribed by the Leaders of the Pack. Intelligent thinkers are not pack thinkers. Call that the Galileo explanation.

(Lots of cognitive science research has established the naivete of such intellectual arrogance. Plenty of highly intelligent people are indeed follow-the-pack thinkers, with plenty of beliefs that contradict or are unsupported by any evidence.)

The new explanation offered for why more intelligent people are less religious, is more sophisticated. Miron Zuckerman, Jordan Silberman and Judith A. Hall suggest that religion and intelligence both provide the same thing, in four important areas.

1. “Compensatory control.” A chaotic world with no order or predictability is a scary world. Religious faith reassures us that the world is orderly and under the predictable control of a Supreme Force. Intelligence and faith in science does the same thing, providing the reassuring sense that the world is orderly and under the control…of physical laws.

2. “Self-regulation.” Religious belief that good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished is an external pressure that helps us moderate our behavior. Intelligence gives people the internal mental firepower necessary for the same self control. (Remember the famous "marshmallow test," where kids are told they can eat the marshmallow sitting on a table in front of them right away, but they would get two marshmallows if they can avoid eating the one right in front of them and wait a few minutes? The kids with self-control rated higher on intelligence scores.)

3. “Self enhancement.” Religiousness helps people feel better about themselves. “I am a better person than others because I am more religious.” Intelligence does too. “I am better person than others because I am smarter.”

4. “Secure Attachment.” As social animals, we need to feel attached to others in order to feel safe. Religion helps us feel attached to others, and to a deity. The study cites evidence suggesting that being intelligence encourages the same thing, noting that intelligent people are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce and to have close personal attachments to others, fulfilling same need for attachment.

I have a lot of quarrels with this study. The business about how intelligence provides us with “Secure Attachment” seems like an intellectual stretch. And there is a ugly intellectual arrogance when researchers say things like; “High IQ-people are able to curb magical, supernatural thinking and tend to deal with the uncertainties of life on a rational-critical-empirical basis.” Cognitive science clearly shows that this smug claim, often made by smart people, is not true, demonstrating just how dumb ostensibly intelligent people can be.

Further, the study suggests that intelligent people are more likely to be non-religious deity-denying atheists because atheists are non-conformists, too intelligent to be taken in by supernatural hocus pocus. But atheists are conformists too, adhering to and fiercely defending their own code of tribal beliefs. Atheism is a religion in every sense of the word except the part about believing in God. (The study’s analysis of atheism is discussed at length in this article in The Independent.)

But the basic finding of this study seems pretty solid; a large majority of studies over the years looking at the relationship between intelligence and religion find a clear inverse relationship between how much we think for ourselves, and how much we let religion do the thinking for us. And the authors make a persuasive argument that the reason may be that intelligence and religion both provide the same thing. The spiritual community I participate in may in fact provide confirming evidence. Unitarian Universalism, the religion for more independent-minded thinkers, remains one of the smallest faiths in America.

First off, I personally know only 2 other atheists. We don't meet. We don't tithe. We don't have a dogma. They're both fairly conservative and I'm fairly liberal. One follows transcendental buddhism. The other 2 of us don't.

Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color.
Atheism is a religion like chess is a contact sport.
Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Second off, why the need to do this? Why the need to say atheism is a religion? Aren't you insulting religion when you do that? I wold think religious people would run screaming from their religious buildings at the very thought. Oh, and atheists don't have those houses of worship either.

We just simply don't believe in god(s). We're only vocal because we have to be. Otherwise, the USA will become like Iran or Saudi Arabia. And, most of us would say, if some evidence turns up for your god, we will be MORE THAN HAPPY to change our minds. THIS is the BIGGEST difference between an atheist and a theist.

Could it be that one of the reasons that people who are more intelligent tend to be less religious is that the often find themselves spenfing years in institutions of higher learning that are often, but not always, very critical of religion? Some disciplines such as Psychology are taught from a distincly anit-religious stand point in some schools. Many in the humanities are under a great deal of pressure by fellow students and professors to not be religious. I found this definitely to be the case when i was an undergraduate.

I don't think that atheism is a religion either. There are no common rituals or gatherings.
And to that point, the term "religion" should only be used and understood to be the ritual aspects of one's faith....
I don't consider myself to be very religious, but I do call myself a Christian, and am spiritual. I also consider myself to be formidably intelligent. I do think that maturity leads one to the better balance of the two.
I would challenge people to consider the comment about thinking good behaviours will be rewarded. I think that is a very poorly represented idea. It at least deserves a more in-depth discussion because I know many people who consider themselves Catholics, for example, that think that as long as they tell people that they are religious, then they can do anything... good or bad. How about some stereotypical mafia types?

Intelligence is not competency in a field (s) of knowledge but the propensity and capacity for learning through experience and applying that information in every and all aspects of life in order learn more efficiently (which is more commonly known as the word "smartness"). Education affects IQ tests but won't change a person's potential capacity to learn. Religion allows us to impose the words of the few onto the many and may hamper some of the human tendency to learn while providing emotional comfort with a set of easy to comprehend beliefs. Hence why adults whom truly believe in most parts of their religion are considered less "intelligent" than people who only used their capacity to learn for achievement.

First of all, it wasn't MY study. Second, having grown up Jewish (conservative, grandparents from "the old country'), I know first hand that emphasis on learning and studying the Talmud is FAR from what you seem to suggest...open-minded objectivity. Third, that doesn't mean KNOWLEDGE and religiousness are opposed. But intelligence, in the world of psychological study, is measured in part on how hard a person is willing to work to keep an open mind and look beyond the first or given answers. I would call the Talmudic scholars I knew, including my grandfather, intelligent people, but not in that way, at least when it came to their religion.

Religion is an attempt to anthropologize the world, in order to make the meaningless meaningful. Humans strive for meaning, and religions are able to give them what they want, in that regard.
People tend to feel quite lost in a world that is only governed by the "cold" laws of physics, especially when they lack the ability to rationalize. Ignoring this very simple state of affairs, and accepting a god-father-figure in ones own life, is an elegant solution to this problem.
The feeling that your life has a purpose, a meaning, that somebody has a plan for you, is something that makes people feel very comfortable. The god-father-figure, or even more abstract beliefs like Karma, are able to provide exactly that: A sense of absolute meaning, concerning your own life.

The "atheistic alternative" would be accepting that "meaning" is an entirely subjective concept, viz. meaning or purpose is something that people have to make for themselves.
That is certainly not an easy thing to accept, and its even harder to apply it in an appropriate and ordered fashion. Highly intelligent people are more likely to be capable of having the mental capability to
a) understand the concept of meaning
b) being able to abstract and rationalize to a sufficient degree, in order to apply the aforementioned to their own life

Long story short: Miron Zuckerman, Jordan Silberman and Judith A. Hall mention 4 points,
- the lack of order, regarding the world we live in
- the lack of self-regulation/control, regarding our behavior
- the lack of self-confidence
- the lack of ability to feel attached to others (I agree that this is quite a stretch)
Religion and the intelligence-substitute supposedly compensate for the aforementioned points.
I'd like to add a 5th point:
- the lack of absolute meaning or purpose, regarding the world we live in

Order of relevance is open to discussion. I'd very much like to hear your opinion.

About "atheism is a religion"... I have to disagree with that, based on my definition of atheism. But this topic in general seems just like a huge semantic game to me. People are juggling with definitions without making an actual point. It leads to nothing else than unfruitful discussions about nothing.